Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/14
It is possible that many kinds of major sensual experience are sublimated into particular sports. For example, last night, with her across my lap,[1] her body exposed and my hands conquering over it, I realized suddenly how close a woman’s body is to a ski slope, and perhaps the fascination of skiing is due to a particular frustration of a particular kind of sexual experience—the great skier needs such triumph and does not have the psychic possibility of finding it in life. Hence he rides like a charioteer over a ski slope, a giant ascetic woman open to his fury. That is, a skin may be capable of all sexual enjoyment, but the one of laying conquering hands whom a wondrous nudity.
Note
- ↑ Mailer’s first reference to his second wife, Adele Morales (1925-1915), who he married in April 1954. The mother of his daughters Danielle (b.1957), and Elizabeth Anne (b. 1959), she separated from NM in early 1961 a few months after he stabbed her in the abdomen with a penknife, just missing her heart. He pled guilty to felonious assault and was given a suspended sentence. They divorced in 1962.
